Ms. Hen reviews LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS by the Boston Ballet and dances in the aisle

LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

Boston Ballet

Boston Opera House

February 26 through March 8

Ms. Hen loves ballet, as all hens do. She went to see LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS, and she was swept away by the dancing. She had read the book and reviewed it previously here on this blog, and she knew that the story wouldn’t be the same because a viewer of the dance isn’t able to get all the back story that a novel will give. But she wanted to see how it would be interpreted.

The ballet is about Marguerite, a courtesan in Paris in the nineteenth century. In the opening scene, she is having a party with her friends. She meets a new gentleman, Armand, and he is discouraged from becoming acquainted with her because she is the lover of someone else. The dancers use wine glasses, and mock being drunk, which Ms. Hen found amusing. She had never seen ballet dancers pretending they were drunk, and it was refreshing to see something different. This isn’t a ballet for children. There weren’t any children in the audience.

Some unique choreography was used in this production. In the second act, in the garden party scene, three men and two women had their arms around each other, and the men dragged the women with one toe behind them. This appeared as if it could be fun, but it could also be painful. In the same scene, the dancers play catch with little brown balls, or possibly hacky sacks. Whenever a game like that is played on stage, inevitably there is a chance a ball could be dropped and one was dropped. The dances in the second act were playful, and showed the feistiness of the situation in which the characters were involved.

This ballet was not the lavish production that Ms. Hen saw last year of Swan Lake, with the special effects and the large amounts of dancers on the stage. This is more of a romantic, psychological ballet, meant to heighten the senses and pierce the heart. It’s tragic to watch what happens to Marguerite at the end.

In the last scene, Anais Chalendard, who plays Marguerite, dances barefoot in a nightgown with her hair down. It’s not often a dancer is barefoot in a ballet, which is difficult. The idea is to convey that she is sick and dying, and she is in bed, and she dances to try to save what is left of her life. Marguerite was a tortured soul, and she suffered.

The music of LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS is Chopin, and Ms. Hen knew a lot of it because she was into Chopin in her tumultuous youth. There were also vocal soloists, which made the sad parts more morose.

Ms. Hen enjoyed this ballet because she takes pleasure from beauty and she likes a sad story. If you’re into upbeat entertainment, LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS might not be for you. But if you love a heartrending love story and passionate dancing, go to the ballet. You might see Ms. Hen sitting on a chair in the balcony, flapping her wings together in approval.

Ms. Hen reviews MR. PENUMBRA'S 24 HOUR BOOKSTORE and wonders about the state of publishing

MR. PENUMBRA’S 24 HOUR BOOKSTORE

by Robin Sloan

Ms. Hen came to read this book because it is a featured book in her town’s library and there are events that surround it, such as discussions, film screenings, dinners and other fun things. There were about forty copies at her local library and they were all out! Ms. Hen thought that it was exciting that people in her town were actually reading a book, and they were reading the same book, so she went to a library in the big city nearby and checked it out.

At first Ms. Hen liked the book because she really wanted to like it. But then she got into it and she just wanted it to be over. It wasn’t the plot or the characters; it was the writing. The writing is juvenile, and Ms. Hen is a Hen with high standards. It’s a plot driven novel, and she continued to read it because she wanted to find out what happened at the end, which is the purpose of a plot driven novel.

The protagonist is Clay, a young man who gets laid off from his job doing marketing for a bagel company, and in desperation, applies for a job and gets hired at Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore doing the overnight shift. A lot of strange people come into the store in the middle of the night and check out books from the Wayback List, which is a type of library. Mr. Penumbra tells him not to look at those books under any circumstances. Of course Clay does, and finds the books are in a type of code.

What ensues is a type of adventure surrounding books, which includes employees at Google, a secret underground library in New York, and a robotic storage facility in Nevada. The story is not anything revolutionary, but it does pose some good questions about the future of books, old knowledge, robots and where the human race will be in one or two thousand years.

When Ms. Hen started reading this novel, it reminded her of THE ABORTION by Richard Brautigan, and she thought they would be similar, but they were not. That novel is about a strange library where people bring in self-written books, which are the only copy in existence. There was also a touch of THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE. Ms. Hen thought MR. PENUMBRA’S 24 HOUR BOOKSTORE could be considered Harry Potter for 25 years olds who don’t know much about literature.

Ms. Hen wonders how such a large amount of books like this could be published. It’s true that not many people read these days, but with books like this, it’s a wonder where the future of the written word is headed. Ms. Hen is considering going to one of two of these events to see who these people are in her town who have all read this book and to hear what they have to say. Hopefully there is at least one person who has standards as high as Ms. Hen’s. There must be someone in this town who knows quality as well as she.

Ms. Hen reviews DOWNFALL and meditates on the importance of learning history

DOWNFALL

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

2004

This film was on Ms. Hen’s Netflix list for a long time, and she finally watched it. She feels that it’s not always the right time to watch a Nazi movie, but she did, and she was enthralled as a hen could be.

The film is about Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary and the final days of World War II in the bunker in Berlin. At the beginning, Junge was chosen from five girls by Hitler to be his secretary. She was warned by her family not to get involved with the Nazis, but she wanted to do something with her life. She was 22 when she was hired.

Fast forward to April 20, 1945. Hitler is in a frenzy: the generals and advisers in the bunker scream at each other about military tactics, and they know they are going to lose the war. Bruno Ganz dominates the film as Hitler; he seems to have Hitler’s quirks and mannerisms. It’s not often that Hitler is portrayed in films; he’s usually a character in the background, but here we come to see him.

One of the background characters complained that Hitler was a non-smoking vegetarian, in that place and time that was abnormal. Not everyone who surrounded him was pure evil, and a lot of the people didn’t know what was happening in other parts of Europe. Eva Braun took care of Junge, and she was kind to her, because she knew Junge was young. Braun wanted to spend her last days partying, and she did, until a bomb hit the building where the party took place.

One of the most moving scenes of the film was when Goebbels’s wife poisoned her children and killed them all. She had complained that she didn’t want to live in a world that did not have National Socialism. After she had killed her children, she calmly sat down to play a game of Solitaire, as if nothing had happened. She and her husband died the next day: he shot her, then himself.

Traudl Junge was not arrested for her involvement with the Nazis. She was dismissed because she was a juvenile. But there were other young people who did know, like Sophie Scholl, who was executed by the Nazis for distributing literature about the atrocities, which was portrayed in the film SOPHIE SCHOLL, THE FINAL DAYS.  Another film that relates to this period in time is A WOMAN IN BERLIN, about the disturbing after effects of the end of World War II. The beginning and the end of DOWNFALL show the interview with Traudl Junge. The companion film to this, BLIND SPOT, HITLER’S SECRETARY, is the interview with her in its entirety.

Ms. Hen couldn’t understand why these people would follow this lunatic and do whatever he said, and kill millions of people. Some things will always be a mystery, but we can learn about them and try not to make the same mistakes again. Even though we wish this could be true, it hasn’t been. We just have to keep forging ahead, and try to teach future generations history.

Ms. Hen reviews LESS THAN ZERO and reminisces about the Eighties

LESS THAN ZERO

by Bret Easton Ellis

Let’s just say this author is a big deal in Ms. Hen’s world. Let’s say she tried to read another book that he wrote and she was so disgusted that she couldn’t finish it. This novel was on her Kindle for a while and she finally got around to reading it.

There’s nothing terrible about LESS THAN ZERO. But there’s nothing fantastic about it either. It belongs to the genre of what Ms. Hen likes to call “party novels,” about characters running around going to parties and misbehaving and getting into trouble, usually by authors such as Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski and sometimes Kurt Vonnegut.

It’s not to say that these pieces of fiction have no merit. It’s just that they’re all the same. The story of LESS THAN ZERO is this: a young man comes back from college for Christmas break and goes to a lot of parties and tries to score some cocaine and looks for his friend.

There are some graphic pieces here, but they are so tame that they are barely worth mentioning. Last year, Ms. Hen read TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller, and that was the most perverse thing she had ever read. LESS THAN ZERO pales in comparison if the purpose is to shock the reader.

The author tries to attract the reader's attention with minor sexual descriptions, and also, LESS THAN ZERO has no redeeming characters. Ms. Hen did not find herself rooting for any of the young people in the book. She read about LESS THAN ZERO, and a lot of readers could relate to what happened in the book, but Ms. Hen thought it is a novel about shallow, narcissistic jerks and if a person could relate to these characters, he must be like that, too.

The one positive aspect of this novel is that it’s a time capsule for an era that doesn’t exist anymore. Young people today would be interested in reading about the Eighties, when there were no cell phones, no computers, when the world’s information was not at your fingertips.

Ms. Hen remembers what that world was like. She knows people who do not. If anything, LESS THAN ZERO can show us how much the world has morphed into something different from what it used to be. It’s about a time when people had to talk to each other at restaurants, and were not staring at their phones.

There’s a payoff for everything. Ms. Hen knows that the world is as screwed up now as it was then. But as a hen, she can only sit by and watch to see what will happen.  She will remember the past, but look towards the future, knowing we’re spiraling in an unknown direction, and it could be either positive or negative. 

Ms. Hen reviews THE LOVE SONG OF A. JEROME MINKOFF AND OTHER STORIES and meditates on the importance of art being universal

THE LOVE SONG OF A. JEROME MINKOFF AND OTHER STORIES

By Joseph Epstein

Ms. Hen came into possession of this book by accident. She was at her chicken friends’ artist apartment building, and there was a box of books outside one of the doors in the building. Ms. Hen is always eager to grab a free book, so she picked this one because it had an interesting title, similar to the poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It took her a while to get around to reading it.

At first Ms. Hen wasn’t really interested in the characters in these short stories, who are all old, rich Jewish men. Ms. Hen is not an old, rich Jewish man, so she thought she would hate this book. But she didn’t.

The stories are all about the same type of character, but each character is looking at and thinking about a character that is completely different from him. In “The Philosopher and the Checkout Girl,” a retired Philosophy professor takes an interest in a cashier at a grocery store and thinks about her life and it changes the way he thinks about his life. They become friends, then more, and they both come to realize what life is as a result.

In the story, “Danny Montoya,” a man runs into an old high school friend who is working at Home Depot. His friend used to be the best tennis player in Chicago for his age. The narrator worshipped Danny when he was young, and he knew he would never have Danny’s talent. The story was about the having the ability or the gift to be the best at something at one point in your life.

The aspect of these stories that Ms. Hen enjoyed was that every story had something in it that everyone can relate to. One of Ms. Hen’s teachers at writing school said that there should be something in her writing that should be universal. These stories succeed in that aspect. After finishing each story, Ms. Hen would stop and take a breath and think, oh, okay, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And she would think about her own life.

There is much controversy about Joseph Epstein and his homophobia. The beginning of his Wikipedia page is all about that issue. Ms. Hen didn’t know that before she read the book, but when she found out about it afterwards, it didn’t affect her opinion of his writing. You can’t judge the artist for the art. If we did, most art would be judged unworthy. Most brilliant people are tainted or crazy in some way.

Ms. Hen likes to think she’s crazy enough to be considered brilliant. But she has a long way to go to prove this to the world. After all, she is a hen. Hens don’t become geniuses. Or do they?

Ms. Hen reviews BUTTERFLY and wonders about her capacity to do the right thing

BUTTERFLY

Directed by Jose Luis Cuerda

1999

For those who have to brush up on their history, BUTTERFLY can be a confusing film. Ms. Hen knows some things about the Spanish Civil War, but not everything, so she had to do research about what was happening in the time period in which the film took place, a time in between the Republic and the fascists, when betrayal and lies were everywhere.

The film is a coming of age story about Moncho, a boy kept out of school because of asthma. When he goes to school he is so nervous on the first day because he thinks he will be beaten, he pees his pants in front of the class. He runs away, but his kind teacher goes to his house and encourages him to come back to school.

Ms. Hen liked the teacher Don Gregorio because he reminded her of a professor she had in chicken school who encouraged her to become a writer. Moncho and the teacher become friends; he shows Moncho how to catch butterflies with a net and explains that butterflies have a tongue that curls out to eat the nectar from the flower.

Ms. Hen’s favorite scene was Moncho and his brother Ramon go to a different town to play with a band and they stay in the house belonging to a man and his Chinese wife. The woman tends to the hens in the barn. She cannot talk, but she can understand, her husband explains. Ramon has his eyes on the wife, and he plays the saxophone while looking at her at the concert.

In the class, Don Gregorio posed a riddle to the students. The question is, if a rooster lays an egg on the border of France and Spain, what nationality would the egg be? One silly boy said, it would be Spanish because they have big balls. But Moncho knew the correct answer (as did Ms. Hen): roosters don’t lay eggs.

Throughout the film, there is a sense of underlying danger. Men on horses watch the Republicans’ party, a man kills a dog of his lover and people are on edge. The viewer knows something evil will happen, and at the end, it does. The film poses a question – what would you do in extreme circumstances? Would you do the right thing, or would you do what you had to do to survive?

Ms. Hen doesn’t know what she would do if she were faced with a conundrum like that. It’s easy to say we would do the right thing, but faced with death or imprisonment of our whole family, the question hangs in the air. Fortunately for Ms. Hen, the major obstacle in her life today in the mountain of snow outside. There are other things, but none is the matter of putting her life at risk. She’s an accessory, and is meant to carry things. She carries the weight of wisdom in her wings.

Ms. Hen reviews THE LADY OF THE CAMILLIAS and decides she is glad she lives in this century, then cries

THE LADY OF THE CAMILLIAS

By Alexander Dumas, fils

Translated by Liesl Schillinger

Ms. Hen’s attention was brought to this novel because she discovered that it inspired the film MOULIN ROUGUE. The story is very different; the novel is not a raucous, high-strung romp like film, but a tortured love story between an idealistic man and a woman who is not expecting to find love, and is dying of consumption.

It is the story of Armand, a young man from the outskirts of Paris, and Marguerite, a “kept woman,” the lover of many men who pay for her apartment and her carriage, clothes, food, and everything. Armand meets Marguerite at the theater and is so smitten that he cannot talk. He runs into her months later, and he and his friend go with her to her apartment with another woman, Prudence and have supper. Marguerite leaves the room to cough up blood in private and Armand shows concern for her, which nobody else had ever done. This touches Marguerite, and they begin their tumultuous love affair.

The problem is that Armand cannot afford to keep Marguerite and be her only lover, but he cannot stand anyone else to be with her. The pull at each other and she seems to torture him. The story is told through Armand recounting the tale to the narrator; a man who discovers Marguerite is dead by attending her estate sale after her death.

THE LADY OF THE CAMILLIAS was better known as a play by the same name in France written by the same author. The play was first shown in Paris in 1852. The story became more famous by the opera LA TRAVIATA, which premiered in Venice in 1853.

Since Ms. Hen is a feminist hen, she struggled with relating to Marguerite’s plight, that she needed men to pay her way. But she realized that this novel was written in a different time, and we cannot rewrite history. We can learn about history and be glad that we don’t live in an era in which women’s options were limited to getting married, becoming a kept woman, a teacher or a nun.

Ms. Hen rarely cries when she reads a novel, but this novel made her cry, since it was so heartrending. Ms. Hen did her research before she read this, and the Schillinger translation is supposed to be best because it shows the desperation and passion of the characters. Ms. Hen highly recommends this novel if one wants to read a heartbreaking love story and to cry like a hen.